The Beneficiary Identification Records Locator Subsystem (BIRLS) database was originally created and maintained by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (the VA). It provides an index to basic biographical information on more than 19.5 million deceased American veterans who received some sort of veterans benefits in their lifetime, including health care, disability or life insurance policies, educational benefits (the GI Bill), mortgage assistance (VA loans), and more. The BIRLS database includes people who served in all branches of the US military, including some branches that no longer exist, such as the Women's Army Corps (WACs) and the Army Air Corps, as well as a few associated non-military groups and government agencies, such as NOAA. It even includes files for some non-US nationals, including veterans of the Philippine Commonwealth Army and Philippine Scouts and Guerillas, who served prior to and during the Second World War.

In 2018, the non-profit organization Reclaim The Records filed what would become a multi-year but ultimately successful Freedom of Information Act or FOIA lawsuit against the VA, winning the right to obtain and publish the majority of the BIRLS database. The data was finally handed over by the VA in 2022. Through BIRLS.org, the BIRLS database is now freely searchable online as free, public, and open data, for the first time. And the data set is now available for free public use here, at the Internet Archive.

Finding a name listed in the BIRLS database means that you can make a free FOIA request for a copy of that deceased veteran's full VA claims file, which may contain hundreds of pages of never-before-seen biographical and historical material about the veteran, their military service, and their interactions with the VA. These files are an incredible resource about the lives of American veterans who served from the late nineteenth century up through the present day. But because 95% of these claims files have not yet been transferred out of the VA to the National Archives, and because until very recently it was almost impossible to access the records through FOIA, these materials were largely unknown and inaccessible to historians, journalists, and genealogists -- until now.

For more information, check out BIRLS.org.

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